Kent Hendricks

Marketing, Consumer Psychology, and Human Behavior

Bookshelf

2022

  1. Robert J. Knecht, The French Religious Wars, 1562-1598
  2. Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism
  3. N.M. Sutherland, The Massacre of St Bartholomew and the European Conflict, 1559-1572
  4. Peter Brown, The Wild Robot
  5. Karen Harrington, Mayday
  6. Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path
  7. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
  8. Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
  9. Henk F.K. van Nierop, The Nobility of Holland: From Knights to Regents, 1500-1650
  10. Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
  11. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
  12. Christopher Paul Curtis, The Mighty Miss Malone
  13. Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783
  14. M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
  15. Louis Sachar, Small Steps
  16. Roald Dahl, Matilda
  17. Todd E. Robinson, A City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan
  18. Louis Sachar, Holes
  19. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song
  20. George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
  21. Richard Peck, A Year Down Yonder
  22. Joan Didion, Blue Nights
  23. George Saunders, Tenth of December
  24. Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
  25. K.W. Swart, William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572-1584
  26. Charles Wilson, Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands
  27. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
  28. Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
  29. Pam Muñoz Ryan, Mañanaland
  30. Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
  31. Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
  32. Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging
  33. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory
  34. Pam Muñoz Ryan, Esperanza Rising
  35. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000
  36. Bas Van Bavel, Manors and Markets: Economy and Society in the Low Countries 500-1600
  37. Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
  38. Noel D. Johnson & Mark Koyama, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom
  39. Melanie Conklin, Counting Thyme
  40. Andrew Robert, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III
  41. Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

2021

  1. Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
  2. David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
  3. Lynda Mullaly Hunt, Fish in a Tree
  4. Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle During the Wars of Religion
  5. Jan de Vries & Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815
  6. Patricia MacLachlan, The Poet’s Dog
  7. Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
  8. David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
  9. Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
  10. Adam Rutherford, How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don’t) Say About Human Difference
  11. Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
  12. Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
  13. Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy
  14. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775
  15. Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
  16. Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come
  17. Michael Lewis, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
  18. Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right
  19. Robert Hutchinson, The Spanish Armada
  20. Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior
  21. James Baldwin, Another Country
  22. Daniel Hill, White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White
  23. Andy Weir, The Martian
  24. M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado, The Changing Face of Empire: Charles V, Phillip II and Habsburg Authority, 1551-1559
  25. Lesley Newson, A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution
  26. Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire
  27. Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt
  28. John McPhee, Annals of the Former World
  29. Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
  30. Colin Morris, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe
  31. Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution
  32. Henry Cloud, Boundaries with Kids: How Healthy Choices Grow Healthy Children
  33. Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815
  34. Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
  35. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition
  36. Carl Zimmer, Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
  37. Jemar Tisby, How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice
  38. Herman Koch, The Dinner
  39. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
  40. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution I: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition
  41. Steven Mintz, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History Of American Family Life
  42. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
  43. Phil Klay, Missionaries
  44. Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
  45. Marilynne Robinson, Jack
  46. Virginia Postrel, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
  47. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
  48. Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
  49. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806
  50. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
  51. Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
  52. Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956
  53. Robert Stein, Magnanimous Dukes and Rising States: The Unification of the Burgundian Netherlands, 1380-1480

2020

  1. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
  2. James D. Tracy, Holland Under Habsburg Rule, 1506-1566: The Formation of a Body Politic
  3. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
  4. Barack Obama, A Promised Land
  5. Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544-1569
  6. Michelle Obama, Becoming
  7. Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
  8. Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
  9. Alistair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries
  10. Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
  11. Andrew Krivak, The Bear
  12. Carlos M.N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650
  13. Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
  14. Michael E. McCullough, The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code
  15. Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt
  16. Graham Darby, The Origins and Development of the Dutch Revolt
  17. Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel
  18. Henry Kamen, The Duke of Alba
  19. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800
  20. Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V
  21. Julia Fox, Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile
  22. Robert M. Hazen, Symphony in C: Carbon and the Evolution of (Almost) Everything
  23. Laura Auricchio, The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered
  24. Matt Richtel, An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives
  25. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
  26. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
  27. Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
  28. John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
  29. Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture
  30. Kirstin Downey, Isabella: The Warrior Queen
  31. Amity Shlaes, Coolidge
  32. Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies
  33. Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci
  34. William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of Empire
  35. John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
  36. Rory Muir, Wellington: The Path to Victory, 1769–1814
  37. Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir
  38. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
  39. Colleen Taylor Sen, Curry: A Global History
  40. C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
  41. Homer, The Iliad
  42. Robert Goodwin, Spain: The Center of the World, 1519–1682
  43. Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II
  44. Robert Hughes, Goya
  45. Alan Gallay, Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire
  46. Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History
  47. James D. Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945
  48. Charles Murray, Human Diversity: Gender, Race, Class, and Genes
  49. Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants
  50. Barbara Theil-Cramer, Flamenco: The Art of Flamenco, Its History, and Development Until Our Days
  51. Patrick O’Brian, Picasso: A Biography
  52. Shaka Senghor, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison
  53. Peter Pierson, The History of Spain
  54. John Hooper, The New Spaniards
  55. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
  56. Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
  57. Ted Gioia, Music: A Subversive History
  58. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
  59. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation
  60. Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson

2019

  1. Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone
  2. Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire
  3. Ben Westhoff, Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap
  4. Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
  5. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox
  6. James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit
  7. Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
  8. Ben Westhoff, Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic
  9. Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
  10. David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
  11. Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
  12. Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision
  13. Cicero, On the Good Life
  14. Edward L. Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
  15. David L. Roll, George Marshall: Defender of the Republic
  16. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian
  17. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall, vol. 1: Education of a General: 1880-1939
  18. Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People
  19. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
  20. David Epstein, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
  21. Anna Fifield, The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jon Un
  22. David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
  23. Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
  24. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
  25. Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
  26. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
  27. Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War
  28. Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
  29. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
  30. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems
  31. Robert Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
  32. Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age
  33. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
  34. David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
  35. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
  36. Lucretius, The Nature of Things
  37. James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
  38. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
  39. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
  40. Richard W. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
  41. Eric Mason, Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice
  42. Candice Millard, Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
  43. Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny
  44. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
  45. Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
  46. Julia Baird, Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
  47. Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
  48. Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century
  49. James Lee McDonough, William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life
  50. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War
  51. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
  52. Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648-1815
  53. Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
  54. Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
  55. Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
  56. Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

2018

  1. Uri Gneezy, The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and The Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life
  2. Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone – Especially Ourselves
  3. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler, Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
  4. William Poundstone, Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
  5. Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
  6. David J. Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good
  7. John F. Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform
  8. Martie Haselton, Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones: How They Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, Influence Our Choices, and Make Us Wiser
  9. Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
  10. Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
  11. Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
  12. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
  13. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
  14. Adam Rutherford, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes
  15. Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
  16. John A. Bargh, Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do
  17. Carl Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
  18. Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses
  19. Finn Murphy, The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road
  20. Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
  21. Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation
  22. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
  23. Daniel H. Pink, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
  24. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
  25. Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
  26. Christopher Ryan, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
  27. Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence
  28. Richard W. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
  29. Philip M. Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
  30. Baruch Fischhoff, Risk: A Very Short Introduction
  31. J. Enfield, How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation
  32. Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
  33. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
  34. Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
  35. Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive
  36. Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Lifein Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
  37. Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won
  38. E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
  39. Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
  40. Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War
  41. Robert Tombs, France, 1814–1914

2017

  1. Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I
  2. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
  3. Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel
  4. E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
  5. George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will
  6. Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
  7. Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning
  8. Neil deGraase Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
  9. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
  10. Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
  11. Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815–1914
  12. Michael Chabon, Moonglow
  13. Robert B. Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
  14. Al Ries and Jack Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
  15. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
  16. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adverntures of Kavalier and Clay
  17. Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—And How it Died
  18. Max H. Bazerman, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making
  19. Ron Chernow, Grant
  20. George Seldon, The Cricket in Times Square
  21. Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
  22. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are
  23. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
  24. Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
  25. Jennifer Jacquet, Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool
  26. Michael Korda, Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee
  27. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
  28. William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
  29. Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
  30. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896
  31. Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil
  32. Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life
  33. Ronald C. White, A. Lincoln
  34. Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
  35. Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame
  36. Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus
  37. David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
  38. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
  39. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
  40. Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds
  41. Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
  42. Alex Kershaw, Escape from the Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew
  43. Richard E. Nisbett, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South
  44. William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964
  45. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  46. Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
  47. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
  48. Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
  49. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia
  50. Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings
  51. Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
  52. Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart: A Novel
  53. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
  54. T. J. Stiles, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
  55. Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
  56. Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
  57. Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason
  58. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man
  59. Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace
  60. Martin Daly, Homicide
  61. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict
  62. Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers
  63. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
  64. Jeff Manion, Dream Big, Think Small: Living an Extraordinary Life One Day at a Time
  65. Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
  66. Tina Fey, Bossypants
  67. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
  68. Sam Harris, Free Will
  69. Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born
  70. Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker
  71. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian
  72. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
  73. Iyengar Sheena, The Art of Choosing
  74. Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord
  75. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
  76. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
  77. Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
  78. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783
  79. Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
  80. William Rosen, The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
  81. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
  82. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
  83. Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
  84. Sun Tzu, The Art of War
  85. Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era
  86. B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy
  87. Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
  88. Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power
  89. Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest
  90. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
  91. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  92. Lars Mytting, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way
  93. William Manchester, The Last Lion, vol. 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965

2016

  1. Robert Tombs, The English and Their History
  2. Geoffrey G. Parker, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy–and How to Make Them Work for You
  3. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
  4. William Manchester, The Last Lion, vol. 2: Winston Spencer Churchill Alone, 1932–1940
  5. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America
  6. Imre Kertész, Fatelessness
  7. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
  8. Richard S. Tedlow, Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American
  9. William Manchester, The Last Lion, vol. 1: Visions of Glory
  10. John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt
  11. Andrew Grove, High Output Management
  12. Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity
  13. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
  14. C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law
  15. Plato, The Republic
  16. Adrian Goldsworthy, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome
  17. Robin Seager, Pompey the Great
  18. Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus
  19. Thomas Evan, Being Nixon: A Man Divided
  20. Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
  21. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
  22. James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
  23. Daniel E. Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
  24. Aristotle, Ethics
  25. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
  26. Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
  27. Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944
  28. Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
  29. Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
  30. Jean Edward Smith, FDR
  31. John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
  32. David Brooks, The Road to Character
  33. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
  34. Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays
  35. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
  36. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
  37. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
  38. Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
  39. Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
  40. Ned Sublette & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
  41. Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
  42. Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea
  43. Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
  44. Carmine Gallo, Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds
  45. Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
  46. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
  47. Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life
  48. George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
  49. Lois Lowry, The Giver
  50. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World
  51. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
  52. Neil Rackham, Spin Selling: Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff
  53. Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
  54. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
  55. Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
  56. Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
  57. David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
  58. Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness
  59. Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times
  60. Blake J. Harris, Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
  61. John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

2015

  1. B.H. Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn from History?
  2. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
  3. R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest Pioneer Period, 1815-1840
  4. Peter Stark, Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival
  5. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
  6. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
  7. Ernest Hemmingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
  8. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
  9. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
  10. Addy Pross, What Is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology
  11. David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
  12. Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
  13. Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts
  14. Joanne J. Jung, Character Formation in Online Education: A Guide for Instructors, Administrators, and Accrediting Agencies
  15. Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
  16. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
  17. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
  18. Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
  19. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love
  20. Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
  21. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
  22. Anthony Trollope, The Warden
  23. Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
  24. Jim Ruark, The House of Zondervan: Celebrating 75 Years
  25. Susan Ackerman, Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah
  26. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
  27. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
  28. Richard S. Hess, Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey
  29. Gerhard Herm, The Phoenicians: The Purple Empire Of The Ancient World
  30. Avinash Dixit, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life
  31. Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge
  32. Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel
  33. Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
  34. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1: The Path to Power
  35. Henry Ford, My Life and Work
  36. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
  37. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
  38. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future
  39. David McCullough, The Wright Brothers
  40. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
  41. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
  42. David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
  43. Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking
  44. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You
  45. Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America
  46. Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
  47. Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
  48. William Poundstone, Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?
  49. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
  50. Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
  51. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
  52. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation
  53. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
  54. David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing
  55. Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle, Book One
  56. Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan
  57. Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
  58. Émile Zola, Germinal
  59. Hugh Ambrose, The Pacific
  60. James D. Hornfischer, Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
  61. Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
  62. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
  63. Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation
  64. Craig L. Symonds, The Battle of Midway
  65. Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
  66. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
  67. David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day
  68. Richard Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights
  69. Marilynne Robinson, Lila: A Novel
  70. Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
  71. James L. Grant, The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself
  72. Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
  73. Jean Edward Smith, Grant
  74. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
  75. Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships
  76. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

2014

  1. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928
  2. Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
  3. Mordechai Cogan, Deuteronomy 1–11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
  4. Simon Garfield, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts
  5. Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others
  6. Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament
  7. William Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?
  8. Michael Bierut, 79 Short Essays on Design
  9. Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel
  10. Choon-Leong Seow, Ecclesiastes: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
  11. Roland De Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
  12. Mordechai Cogan, I Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
  13. Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity
  14. Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
  15. Julia Lovell, The Opium War
  16. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
  17. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus
  18. Kathleen Kenyon, Jerusalem: Excavating 3000 Years of History
  19. Leo G. Perdue, Families in Ancient Israel
  20. Israel Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts
  21. Sandra L. Richter, The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament
  22. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the book of Genesis. From Noah to Avraham
  23. Yohanan Aharoni, The Land of the Bible: A Historical Geography
  24. Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One: From Adam to Noah
  25. William W. Hallo, Ancient Near East: A History
  26. Trude Dothan, Moshe Dothan, People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines
  27. Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10,000-586 B.C.E.
  28. Alfred J. Hoerth, Peoples of the Old Testament World
  29. John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology
  30. Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice
  31. Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
  32. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
  33. Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain
  34. A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague: The Story of London’s Most Deadly Year
  35. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
  36. Jeff Manion, The Land Between: Finding God in Difficult Transitions
  37. Ryan Holiday, Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
  38. Eric Jay Dolin, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail
  39. Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific
  40. Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
  41. Peter Ackroyd, London: A Biography
  42. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
  43. George Gissing, New Grub Street
  44. Stephen Berlin Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
  45. Nicholas A. Basbanes, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History
  46. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
  47. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
  48. David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood
  49. Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
  50. Albert Camus, The Fall
  51. Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
  52. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
  53. Fred Beckey, Range of Glaciers: The Exploration and Survey of the Northern Cascade Range
  54. Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930
  55. Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle
  56. Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region
  57. Jeff Manion, Satisfied: Discovering Contentment in a World of Consumption
  58. Donald W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805-1910
  59. Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
  60. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
  61. Brad H. Young, The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation
  62. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
  63. George B. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
  64. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
  65. Al Pittampalli, Read This Before Our Next Meeting
  66. Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945
  67. N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God
  68. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
  69. Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House
  70. Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

2013

  1. Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception
  2. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
  3. James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works
  4. Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
  5. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
  6. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
  7. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
  8. Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
  9. Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
  10. Albert Camus, The Stranger
  11. Tammi J. Schneider, An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion
  12. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible
  13. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
  14. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History
  15. Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story
  16. James A. Michener, The Source
  17. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict, 1881–1998
  18. Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire
  19. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
  20. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
  21. Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
  22. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
  23. David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents
  24. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
  25. Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt
  26. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
  27. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex
  28. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
  29. Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
  30. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
  31. Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On
  32. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968
  33. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
  34. Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
  35. Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great
  36. Randy Schilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
  37. David Flusser, Jesus
  38. Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels
  39. Kenneth E. Bailey, Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel’s Story
  40. Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1: Prolegomena to Theology
  41. Bee Wilson, Consider the Fork: How Technology Transforms the Way We Cook and Eat
  42. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
  43. Don DeLillo, White Noise
  44. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

2012

  1. Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
  2. Christopher Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War
  3. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
  4. Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History
  5. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
  6. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?
  7. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
  8. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
  9. Martin Hengel, The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of Its Canon
  10. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir
  11. Ivan Bunin, The Village
  12. D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
  13. Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America
  14. Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away
  15. Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide
  16. David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
  17. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution
  18. Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
  19. John Keegan, The First World War
  20. Augustine, On Christian Teaching
  21. Susan Sontag, On Photography
  22. Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness
  23. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
  24. Denis Diderot, The Nun
  25. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
  26. Raymond E. Brown, Introduction to the Gospel of John
  27. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
  28. Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self
  29. Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys
  30. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
  31. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century
  32. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ
  33. Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines
  34. Robert H. Wiebe The Search for Order, 1877-1920
  35. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4: The Passage of Power
  36. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  37. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, a History: The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War
  38. Flannery O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge
  39. Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
  40. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
  41. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
  42. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
  43. Robert Hughes, Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding
  44. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
  45. Julie Clawson, Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices
  46. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2: God and Creation
  47. Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of the South Seas
  48. Eric Jay Dolan, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
  49. George Feifer, Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism, 1853
  50. Jacob Adler, Claus Spreckels: The Sugar King in Hawaii
  51. David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought
  52. Adria L. Libolt, A Deputy Warden’s Reflections on Prison Work
  53. David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784-1900
  54. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
  55. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life
  56. Herman Melville, Typee
  57. Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842
  58. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
  59. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands
  60. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
  61. Saul Bellow, Herzog
  62. Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of Word War II
  63. Wendell Berry, Remembering
  64. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  65. J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties
  66. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution–A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
  67. Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It

2011

  1. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
  2. Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life
  3. Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
  4. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine
  5. Machiavelli, The Prince
  6. Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942
  7. Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!
  8. James K. A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition
  9. Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
  10. Rob Bell, Love Wins
  11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
  12. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
  13. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
  14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
  15. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
  16. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution
  17. Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts
  18. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Apricot Jam and Other Stories
  19. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
  20. Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
  21. Frank Conroy, Body and Soul
  22. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
  23. Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People
  24. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
  25. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
  26. O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings
  27. Clifford Krauss, Inside Central America: Its People, Politics, and History
  28. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  29. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  30. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
  31. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation
  32. Hector Perez-Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America
  33. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
  34. Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
  35. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill
  36. Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life
  37. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
  38. John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
  39. Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
  40. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq
  41. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
  42. John Cheever, Falconer
  43. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy
  44. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
  45. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
  46. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
  47. Brian F. Atwater, The Orphan Tsunami of 1700
  48. Thorton Wilder, The Bridge Of San Luis Rey
  49. Thorton Wilder, The Eighth Day
  50. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace
  51. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism
  52. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
  53. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples
  54. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God
  55. Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
  56. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
  57. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God
  58. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965
  59. Dana Mackenzie, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be
  60. James K. Wellman, Jr., Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest
  61. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God
  62. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
  63. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63
  64. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation
  65. Sinclair Lewis, Babbit
  66. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 2: Means of Ascent
  67. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of the Dorian Gray

2010

  1. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
  2. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
  3. Jesse R. Smith, Thomas Robinson Cutler: Pioneer, Sugarman, Churchman
  4. Bill Bryson, At Home: A Brief History of Private Life
  5. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius VanderBilt
  6. Herman Melville, Moby Dick
  7. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order
  8. David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
  9. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1977-1920
  10. David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
  11. Jimmie Don Conway, Spreckels Sugar Company: The First Fifty Years
  12. Alfred S. Eichner, The Emergence of Oligopoly: Sugar Refining as a Case Study
  13. The Sugar Beet Story
  14. Paul Wolman, Most Favored Nation: The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897-1912
  15. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
  16. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
  17. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
  18. Ian McEwan, Atonement
  19. Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina
  20. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
  21. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
  22. Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
  23. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 3: Master of the Senate
  24. James H. Shideler, Farm Crisis, 1919-1923
  25. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform
  26. George Eliot, Middlemarch
  27. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
  28. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
  29. Matthew C. Godfrey, Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921
  30. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
  31. Roberto Bolaño, 2666
  32. Roy Vernon Scott, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914
  33. Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus
  34. Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace
  35. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
  36. Steven R. Weisman, The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson–The Fierce Battles over Money and Power That Transformed the Nation
  37. David Sarasohn, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era
  38. Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  39. Upton Sinclair, Oil!
  40. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
  41. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hounds of the Baskervilles
  42. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
  43. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
  44. Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates
  45. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
  46. John Milton Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
  47. Jane Austin, Emma
  48. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
  49. Cormac McCarthy, The Road
  50. James Agee, A Death in the Family
  51. Philip Roth, American Pastoral

2009:

  1. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
  2. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
  3. David McCullough, Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
  4. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
  5. Thomas More, Utopia
  6. John Lee Anderson, Che
  7. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford History of the United States)
  8. David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
  9. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
  10. David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
  11. Fred G. Taylor, A Saga of Sugar, Being a Story of the Romance and Development of Beet Sugar in the Rocky Mountain West
  12. Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala
  13. Joan Didion, Salvador
  14. Joan Didion, The White Album
  15. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954
  16. Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem
  17. N. T. Wright, Simply Christian
  18. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
  19. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections
  20. Stephen E. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
  21. John Updike, Bech: A Book
  22. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (Oxford History of the United States)
  23. George Orwell, Animal Farm
  24. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs
  25. Tim Keller, The Reason for God
  26. Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant
  27. John Updike, Toward the End of Time
  28. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City
  29. George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life
  30. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
  31. Toni Morrison, Beloved
  32. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
  33. David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal
  34. Leonard J. Arrington, Beet Sugar in the West: A History of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1891-1966
  35. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
  36. Keith Murray, The Story of Banking in Whatcom County
  37. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
  38. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America
  39. John Updike, Rabbit is Rich
  40. James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (Oxford History of the United States)
  41. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
  42. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
  43. John Updike, Rabbit Redux
  44. Albert Camus, The Plague
  45. Phyllis W. Bultmann, The Great Depression and its Fifty Year Shadow
  46. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States)
  47. Philip Schaff, Slavery and the Bible
  48. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
  49. Cliff Mass, Pacific Northwest Weather
  50. John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies
  51. John Ortberg, Faith and Doubt
  52. John Updike, Rabbit, Run
  53. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
  54. Orhan Pamuk, Snow
  55. Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism
  56. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States)
  57. Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities
  58. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Oxford History of the United States)
  59. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
  60. David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War: 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)
  61. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
  62. Greg Stielstra, Pyromarketing
  63. Malcom Gladwell, Outliers

2008:

  1. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
  2. William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well
  3. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
  4. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
  5. Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point
  6. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
  7. David McCullough, Truman
  8. Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says about Us)
  9. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 1: Prolegomena
  10. Alan Jacobs, Original Sin
  11. Lelah Jackson Edson, The Fourth Corner: Highlights from the Early Northwest
  12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
  13. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States)
  14. Garrett Martin, The History of the Bellingham Bay and British Columbia Railroad in Whatcom County, Washington
  15. Marilynne Robinson, Home
  16. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
  17. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
  18. Anne Tyler, Saint Maybe
  19. David McCullough, 1776
  20. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
  21. Cynthia Gorney, Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars
  22. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
  23. Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows
  24. Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
  25. Thomas Paine, Common Sense
  26. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
  27. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800
  28. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  29. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
  30. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
  31. Voltaire, Candide
  32. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
  33. David McCullough, John Adams
  34. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
  35. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
  36. Dawn Iacobucci, Kellogg on Marketing
  37. James Joyce, Dubliners
  38. Khaled Husseini, The Kite Runner
  39. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be
  40. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  41. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
  42. Rex Welshon, The Philosophy of Nietzsche
  43. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
  44. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
  45. Bob Pritchett, Fire Someone Today
  46. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
  47. William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
  48. Don J. Easterbrook, Geology and Geomorphology of Western Whatcom County
  49. Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
  50. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  51. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
  52. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  53. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

2007

  1. Anton Chekhov, Stories
  2. Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America
  3. Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
  4. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
  5. William James, Pragmatism
  6. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
  7. Leo Tolstoy, Death of Ivan Ilych
  8. Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man
  9. Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice
  10. Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
  11. Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
  12. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
  13. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  14. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
  15. Chester P. Michael and Marie C. Norrisey, Prayer and Temperament
  16. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground
  17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
  18. James Fowler, Stages of Faith
  19. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
  20. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
  21. Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought
  22. Augustine, Confessions
  23. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
  24. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
  25. Lisa Margonelli, Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline
  26. Bob Ekblad, Reading the Bible With the Damned
  27. Kenneth Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes
  28. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
  29. Kenneth Bailey, Poet and Peasant: A Cultural-Literary Approach to the Parables in Luke
  30. Mary Roach, Stiff
  31. Sherwin Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter
  32. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
  33. Nicholas Wolterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief
  34. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
  35. Andrew Barr, Drink: A Social History of America
  36. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
  37. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
  38. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

Other Favorites:

Philosophy for Understanding Theology, Diogenes Allen

Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Jean Baudrillard

A History of the English Language, 5th ed., Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable (Author)

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

The Life and Times of the Thunderbold Kid: A Memoir, Bill Bryson

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, Marva Dawn

The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture, Dell Dechant

Course in General Linguistics, by Ferdinand de Saussure

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, Thomas Lynch

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller

Bringing Heaven Down to Earth, Nathan Bierma

Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris

1984, George Orwell

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker

Words and Rules, Steven Pinker

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan

Gilead, A Novel, Marilynne Robinson

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Though, Marilynne Robinson

The Evolution-Creation Struggle, Michael Ruse

The Art of Worship, Greg Scheer

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, Gary Schmidt

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Girl Meets God: A Memoir, Lauren Winner

Real Sex, Lauren Winner

Worship Seeking Understanding, John D. Witvliet